by Geling Yan
She said sweetly, “From now on I won’t be able to touch alcohol.” She waited for him to ask why, but he just started eating and drinking in silence, as if something was on his mind. She asked if the students had annoyed him. He said there wasn’t a day when those young idiots didn’t make him angry.
She said, “Let’s have a baby.”
He didn’t even look up. “Why?”
“We ought to have a baby,” she said, her heart cooling down.
He said he couldn’t see why they “ought to.”
She said, “Isn’t it good to have a child? A family ought to have a child.”
“So whatever you do, it’s because you ‘ought to’?”
She was silent. The red candles flickered listlessly.
Right, so who got to decide what they “ought to” do? Love was no longer enough to bring together these two souls, these two bodies. They needed a child to do that. The baby would provide a new theme, filling their withering days with a new story.
Hongmei had told the secret talker frankly that before she became pregnant, she’d gone for coffee with a male classmate and then accompanied him to a concert in San Francisco. There’d even been a couple of times when they’d stopped at the lights and before driving off when he’d kissed her. He was a Northern European. At that time, Northern Europe still felt mysterious to her.
Before getting pregnant, she had tasted disappointment for the first time. She’d always thought there would be an even bigger world in front of her, an even more perfect man waiting for her love. In the end, this wasn’t the case. She had married into the Pacific Coast, giving up everything else. And this was all she had gotten in return. Often, when she was enjoying an ice cream, trying on expensive clothes, or watching the latest movie, her mind would wander into questioning whether this was the bigger, better world she’d wanted, the one she’d sacrificed so much for, causing so much destruction in her pursuit of it. A dull despair would wash over her, and she would toss aside the latest fashions or her favorite ice cream. What should she do with this disillusionment? How could she deal with the melancholy that frequently overtook her? She thought about the educated youth, playing his harmonica on that haystack, his eyes filling with expectation and sadness as he described the most delicious ice cream in the world. If he were still alive, and in her place, would he also be sighing, Is this all there is?
Just as she was at the “Is this all there is?” stage, the baby had shown up.
How many times have children broken a stalemate? In movies both good and bad, babies were always a turning point.
She hadn’t expected such a negative response from Glen. She sat there, feeling herself shrinking, just like the red candles, while Glen lectured her about the virtues of childlessness. Lying felt ugly.
She had told the secret talker that up to this point, her disappointment had been hazy and incomprehensible, but in that instant, it had grown concrete. To this day, she still wasn’t sure what exactly Glen’s objection to babies was. People who don’t like children inevitably lack tenderness, and those who don’t understand kids are always poor at communication. The secret talker could surely imagine how great her disenchantment had been.
She said nothing. Ten days later, she quietly went for an abortion. The procedure went badly, leaving her bleeding heavily. Not wanting to alarm Glen, she quietly took herself to the ER. The doctor said half the fetus had been left inside her body but would be eliminated naturally. Following his instructions, she collected in a jar everything her body expelled, so the hospital could examine it and make sure the fetal tissue was all gone. The jar stayed hidden in a cardboard box behind the toilet bowl.
Glen noticed it and asked what that bloody mass was.
Her heart filled with vicious swear words. She wanted to say, Isn’t that what you wanted? Now we won’t have descendants. Or else, Can’t you tell? That’s the result of us bumping uglies. But instead, she gritted her teeth and just stared at him.
In that moment, she had seen her ex-husband’s face, so boyish and yet every inch her husband. When Jianjun had seen her emerge from the abortion room, he’d scooped her up and, just like that, carried her up four flights of stairs, sobbing and cursing all the way, “Quotas, quotas—next time we’re having it, quota or no quota.”
But then Glen said, “I said I didn’t want children, but I didn’t ask you to have an abortion.”
So he knew. It turned out that Glen had intercepted her mail and seen the hospital bill for the abortion.
He said, “Now that the child was here, I’d have adjusted myself and welcomed him. Why did you have to go against destiny and kill him?”
She screamed, “You’re inhuman, inside and out!” She realized she’d started yelling in Chinese. Why was that such a relief? She went on: “Jianjun wouldn’t have treated me like this! Jianjun! I let you down!”
She was howling, the way women keened for the dead in her little village.
Glen didn’t understand any of this, just stood to one side, murmuring, “It’ll be all right, it’ll be all right.”
She shouted, “Fuck your ‘It’ll be all right’! You broke me and Jianjun apart. I must have been blind!”
He said, “Everything will be all right.”
Later that night, she had gotten up, feeling as weak as wet paper. Finding some aspirin in the medicine cabinet, she thought any pills could kill you if you took enough of them. Standing by the bed, she stared at Glen as he slumbered. She thought, At least he has no trouble sleeping. She didn’t know how long she stayed there, looking at this American man she’d given everything up to chase after. Twenty-eight years old, not even halfway through her life, and she’d always been the one doing the chasing. She’d never lied about this but would openly declare to all her female friends, “I was the one who pursued him. It wasn’t easy to tie him down!”
Look at this happiness she’d chased down.
Jianjun had had his nasty moments too, and at those times she’d also thought: Look, there’s the man I ran after.
She turned away from the bed, felt dizzy, and crashed to the floor. It was no more than nine yards from the kitchen to the bedroom, but she didn’t have the strength to make it even that far. Still clutching the aspirin bottle, she drifted off.
The next morning, she woke up and found she’d changed back to the daytime version of herself—the way others saw her: sensible, sweet-natured, decorous. Daytime her would never have gulped down ten aspirin tablets. As she pulled herself from the confusion of the overdose and returned to Glen’s side, she became a different woman.
The same thing happened this time. After running out in the storm, despite Glen’s protests, she drove around aimlessly until she was too exhausted to continue without crashing, parked on a side street, and fell asleep. In the morning, she was subdued and returned to Glen’s side. And as always, Glen said nothing.
* * *
It’s as you said: I’m emotionally repressed. More than ten years ago, I was repressed with Jianjun as well, and it was Glen who opened me up. But now I’m repressed with him.
The secret talker said he’d always known she was a dangerous woman. He had a good eye for women like her. His daughter was dangerous too. In her eyes, the world suddenly became laughable and contemptible.
He had watched her pass between two identical two-story buildings, then through a vast parking lot, her shoulders tilted a little to the left, a habit left over from when she’d carried a rifle on her back. The shopping mall had seven or eight chain stores, five fast food chains, three chain banks, a chain supermarket, and a chain gas station. Like most malls in this country, the walls were painted pale pastel colors, the ceiling a swathe of ocean blue.
What distinguishes America is that it’s made up of these indistinguishable chains.
You put a couple of coins into the machine and took a newspaper, the secret talker wrote. Then you froze, staring at the shopping mall in front of you crouching stupidly, hideously on the horizon. What damned architect designe
d this squat building? You couldn’t remember which city you were in; it could have been anywhere in the US. The chain stores crisscrossed the whole country, chaining everyone up, erasing individuality—individuality was dangerous. The chains made everyone march in step, which was easier. The safe, chained people sat, obese, in the setting sun, enjoying the pleasure of not communicating. Talking carried too much risk. How many people could survive the cut and thrust of conversation, the pinprick of truth? How strong, how intelligent, how positive would the survivors need to be? Look how secure people are in the embrace of chains. Even the pigeons seemed at ease, waddling happily around the outdoor seating. This scene was absurd, hideous. You suddenly remembered how hard you’d chased after this more than a decade ago. The last time you went back to your hometown, you told the children that America had countless malls, each the size of the little village. That kind of material excess was beyond those children’s imagination.
His words were filled with a disgust that hadn’t been there before.
He said Hongmei had changed her mind at the supermarket entrance, taking a step back after the automatic doors had opened for her, turning right and heading into Starbucks instead. There was an eight-foot-long bulletin board there, where people put up notes advertising rooms for rent, secondhand goods, or private classes. Lamps from the forties were being sold as antiques. He saw Hongmei reach out to grab a slip of paper with a landlord’s phone number on it, but soon after that she stuck it back, turning to another ad. This one was right at the bottom, not very noticeable. It had a picture of a hunting dog, so he thought it must be for a pet obedience school. Hongmei knelt down, her hand resting against the wall, to see the text more clearly. The words were jammed together, a dense black mass covering half the paper.
He had seen Hongmei rip off the last little paper tag hanging from the bottom—the other nineteen were already gone. She held it in her palm and studied it, head tilted to one side. When a gust of wind blew it away, she took a couple of steps after it, then stopped, watching it twist and turn, flying far away. When he had looked back at her face, it seemed she’d had a new thought.
After she left, he’d gone over to look at the hunting dog ad. It wasn’t anything to do with animals, it turned out, but an advertisement for a retired private investigator. He or she taught a method of vanishing from the people who knew you. Anyone with a past they wanted to leave behind could use this tactic to start anew. And if you were tired of your marriage or your profession, this was also the cheapest, least harmful way to leave. If you were tired of yourself and wanted a brand-new personality, this gave you the best chance of achieving that. And of course, it made life a lot easier for men who wanted to become women, or vice versa. An eight-week course (an hour and a half per week) and a thousand dollars in fees was all you needed to end your previous identity and start all over again.
He told Hongmei that in 1992, the San Francisco Chronicle had run an article about the phenomenon of people vanishing, mentioning several books that told you how to do it. By 1993, more than seventy thousand people had disappeared nationwide. Some had been in debt, some had committed murder, some had been accused of a crime with no way to prove their innocence, some had been enmeshed in affairs they couldn’t free themselves from. These people had carefully planned every step of their disappearance, acquiring new birth certificates, IDs, and Social Security numbers, then one night or one early morning, they had vanished forever. Some had faked their own suicide or murder; others had left behind sincere goodbye letters.
Imagine how these seventy thousand people were now. Whether their vanishing had brought them pain or joy, it had surely opened up a vast unknown world to them.
Of these seventy thousand, some had gone abroad, where they became adventurers or language teachers. The Far East was ideal for this. Take China—newly liberated, naive about the West . . . Can you imagine? Perhaps among your foreign professors there was a member of the vanished, someone who’d become too disppointed in others or in himself.
Hongmei looked at that word, “disppointed,” spelled wrongly for the twenty-third time.
He said he’d been watching her through binoculars, but when she had gotten to the shopping mall, she hadn’t known where she was going.
She felt a little uneasy. Why was he always lurking in the dark, leaving her unprepared for their encounters?
He seemed to sense the anguish she wasn’t expressing and said he was very sorry, he knew he was always flaking out at the last minute, afraid of letting her down if he came out from behind the shield of words, by being just an ordinary man. He confessed to using extra-powerful binoculars to bring her closer to himself, examining her detail by detail. This way, he could own her body, inch by inch, kissing her bit by bit. Her underdeveloped breasts were mesmerizing to him; the birthmark on her ass filled him with savage desire.
She gaped at these words. How had he seen that birthmark? Had she revealed it while she was swimming? But she did her laps first thing in the morning, when there were hardly any people at the pool.
He said he knew this sort of obsession was unhealthy, but he couldn’t help it. He wanted her to believe that he understood love, both spiritual and physical.
The binoculars pulled you into my arms. Feel my chest—broad enough for you? My shoulders—firm enough? My skin, which smells like I’ve been out in the sun. My body is warm. Your hands feel cool against it. Parched skin beneath them. And these are your eyes, black and inviting. Inviting sympathy, understanding, even invasion. And so you brought this on yourself. You can’t escape now. Invasion always hurts a little. Now you’ll open yourself up and accept me.
Hongmei was breathing hard. She blazed as she read these words, hating herself for being so useless, and hating him for luring her down this evil path. Did she really hate him? She couldn’t work it out.
He told her to meet him in a neighborhood in San Francisco called South of Market, in a bar called The EndUp. He said he owned a little apartment with a terrace in the city with a beautiful view, and if she wanted, he could invite her over. He didn’t want her to feel scared. The EndUp was very trendy and always packed with men and women flirting with each other. He and she could have a proper conversation there, or they could just flirt, or not flirt. This was a place where you could be serious or casual.
She left a note on the refrigerator saying that she was going to San Francisco to meet a couple of friends from China and would be back late. Glen had also left a folded note for her, but she didn’t read it and just put it in her pocket. Seeing Glen’s writing would weaken her. She couldn’t lose her resolve.
She drove for almost two hours, arriving and finally finding parking in the South of Market district at three in the afternoon. The antiwar protest had created traffic congestion, blocking the entrance to office buildings, so the workers trying obediently to get to their jobs were now waiting in the streets for the police to escort them inside in small groups. She remembered Nini saying she was coming into town with dozens of students, and she started scanning the crowds. Sure enough, there was Nini on Market Street. She and her boyfriend were both in white T-shirts, smeared with red paint to look like blood, a gory sight at first glance. Nini had recently become a bit of a heroine within the movement and was frequently interviewed on TV.
“Did Glen come with you?” she yelled.
Hongmei lied, saying Glen had classes and couldn’t come.
“I just saw him!” Nini turned to her boyfriend. “Isn’t that right? He was standing over there, taping it.”
Hongmei’s heart went boom. Glen must be secretly watching her.
Nini said she wanted to eat fruit with shaved ice and dragged Hongmei and her boyfriend into a shop. When they saw her “bloodstained” shirt, everyone started yelping in shock. Nini nonchalantly told her boyfriend to get the desserts and then turned back to chat with Hongmei. She said her boyfriend had almost fallen madly in love with the girl who’d destroyed her father. But, by the way, she could make one thin
g clear: the girl spelled “disappointment” correctly, which is to say the secret talker had indeed just been making use of her identity.
Now that Nini was a star of the antiwar movement, all the tycoons in every industry had seen her getting led away by the police, singing “The Internationale” sweetly at the camera. Not one of them would go out with her now.
Hongmei asked if she still wanted to marry a rich man.
She said she felt differently now that she was a revolutionary, as if a different set of hormones had started flowing through her body. She no longer found millionaires sexy, just as in the past when she hadn’t found poor men attractive, even if they were handsome. She said whatever got her blood going was good—that’s all she needed.
Hongmei said goodbye to Nini and her boyfriend and plunged into the crowd of protesters. Her brain worked swiftly, trying to decide what she should say if she bumped into Glen. She knew she must look ridiculous and decided this would be the last time—after this she would tell Glen everything.
She glanced at her watch. It was still an hour till her meeting with the secret talker. She’d deliberately gotten here early, to give herself time to scope out the area and make sure she had an escape route. She was five blocks from The EndUp, and the walk would give her time to steady herself. She got out her compact mirror and lipstick, which was the trendiest shade and made her mouth look soft and moist. As she put her compact back into her purse, her hand bumped against another object: a toothbrush. She’d actually brought a toothbrush. All the contradictory plans she’d made had included spending the night here. She pressed her fingers against the bristles and rubbed hard, thinking, Let’s see how wild this woman gets today. Driving for two hours to meet a man from the internet. And after that? Would he take advantage of the singer hitting a long note to grab her hand and pull her from the nightclub, a woman who came with her own toothbrush?
On the way to The EndUp, she found herself wishing it was farther away, to give her more time to think.
In her last email she’d told him a story from her childhood that no one else knew.